Bias in academia

Megan McArdle:

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think there’s any sort of conspiracy against conservatives in the academy. I think, rather, that a combination of more subtle factors erects a wall that it’s harder for conservatives to climb over. Unless they are really, really brilliant, academics, like everyone else, need personal connections to help them up the academic ladder, from recommendations to mentors to advisors. Those personal connections are always much easier to make with people you agree with. Nor would I discount the possibility that, just as women’s work can be subtly dismissed because we know women aren’t as bright as men, academics who think that conservatives are stupid would factor that into their assessment of someone’s intelligence–and then factor that assessment into their assessment of someone’s work. And of course, one’s ideas are to some extent socially constructed; simply by virtue of the arguments and information we hear, even if there is no social pressure to conform, being surrounded by a political culture will tend to drag our ideas in their direction.

And the idea that academia exerts no pressures to conform is spectacularly hilarious to anyone who’s ever spent any time at all around academics. Perhaps the funniest sight I have ever witnessed is the spectacle of a sociologist cruising straight past the analyses of power relationships and group norms that they apply to every single other facet of human existence, and insisting that the underrepresentation of conservatives in academic could only be explained by the fact that conservatives are a bunch of money-grubbing intellectual lightweights who can’t stand rigorous examinations of their ideas, and moreover are too intolerant to fit into the academic community.

The sociologist, you see, is inside academia, and so able to analyze it better than outsiders. Also, the sociologist knows that neither they, nor any of their friends, is biased, so the answer must be that there’s something wrong with conservatives.

…

I have more than once been in a situation (in high school) where, paradoxically, I resorted to using sociological reasons and arguments to argue (/explain) why most of the sociologists are a bunch of raving lefties. I must admit that before they accept applying their own methods of analysis to themselves and their own subject, without setting up smoke screens or outright denying the validity of the analysis, I will have a hard time thinking of most sociologists as anything but, as Megan puts it, “intellectual lightweights”.

Incidentally, I think what might be termed the relative bias in education, that is; the difference in political opinion between the public and academics in general, is not as bad here in Denmark as it is elsewhere. In Denmark to be a socialist is the norm, so there’s less room for academics to expand to the left, if one might put it that way, than there is elsewhere. However, I will not exclude the possibility that what might be termed the total level of bias, that is in this case; the total level of bias the political opinions of academics cause in the social sciences, quite likely is higher than it is a lot of other places. However, I still think the latter bias is much more of a problem in Sweden and a lot of non-Western countries than it is here.